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Lightning
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| FTLComm - Winnipeg & Saskatoon - Wednesday, August 3, 2005 |
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Frame 1
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Frame 2
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Frame 3
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Frame 4
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As we went into the movie in the St. James area
of Winnipeg the sky looked a bit meaner than usual and half way through "The
Island" the screen went dark as the storm outside shut down power to that part
of the city for about fifteen minutes. When we came out the streets were wet and
the air hot and humid and the sky above coal black. Snaking through the clouds were
bolts of lightning that light up the layers of cloud below and we set off to a vantage
point were we could view the city and perhaps get a picture of lightning.
Now lightning is pretty frustrating stuff to photograph. It can not be predicted
as to when it will occur and when it does happen the light intensity makes for pretty
bad pictures.
After about twenty minutes of frustration with two still cameras I decided to put
it on tape and see how that went and the short clip above is a condensed version
of some of that footage with downtown Winnipeg in as the base line.
Meanwhile on the following night south of Saskatoon at his country home Doug Freestone drew the same conclusion and with his video camera tried to
capture the phenomena.
Below is what he tells us about his experience:
We had a huge thunderstorm on Sunday evening. Big
rain, huge wind and mucho lightning.
I was out on the second floor deck with the small Sony digital camera shooting
video segments of the wind beating my antennas to death.
I was glued to the viewfinder with the other eye shut and and had just pressed the
stop button when WHAM! a big lightning bolt hit only 1500-2000 feet SE of us and
right in front of the camera. The last four frames in that segment caught the
lightning.
Frame-1 just shows the "starter thread" of the lightning
bolt that comes up from the ground in advance of the big ZOT.
The other frames are over-exposed. That poor li'l camera just can't react fast
enough when hit by that much light. Those are four successive frames, just
1/30 sec apart in real time. It's too bad the camera did not run for just another
half second. I would have liked to see the decay of the bolt for a few more
frames.
Next time we have a storm, I'll try again with some different settings.
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Timothy W. Shire
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| This page is a story posted on Ensign and/or Saskatchewan
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images, political commentary, information and news. These publications are the work
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Editor : Timothy W. Shire
Faster Than Light Communication
Box 1776, Tisdale, Saskatchewan, Canada, S0E 1T0
306 873 2004
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